Reader Comments

Both websites wrote a story about how broken the game is for PS3 owners, but I’m sure Bethesda didn’t notice that right?

When is Bethesda/Zenimax/Obsidian just going to own up to the fact they have no idea what they are doing when it comes to the PS3 console?

When is Bethesda/etc. going to refund PS3 owners the money they have spent for all of the broken games and dlc since Oblivion? I know Obsidian isn’t responsible for all of the titles, but the refunds should include Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, and Skyrim.

Bethesda, enough of the broken games for the PS3. Enough of making it worse by leaving them broken when apparently you know how to fix them as has been publicly stated by Pete Hines.

wow hold ya horses dude, the fallout game were not broken, there worked fine with all the recent updates. i know cause i played them both not two months ago.

skyrim is a very different matter though as the experiance has been ruined due to all the problems on ps3 and after 75hours of play it is unbearable and unplyable, even after turning off autosave. real shame since i payed over 60quid to get this.

i totally agree with you there, skyrim has been ruined due to all the issues and bethesda should test there wares before releasing, im sure im not the only one that would wait a few extra months for a game so you get something that works. having said that i think it is standard practice now-a-days to just release stuff without testing it(eg. windows, dead island, and generally everything)

while for the most part i agree with you, i do have one thing to add. you mention they cant correctly code for the ps3 you should probably add xbox to that list aswell considering they’ve got most of the same bugs and are too getting the lag (just takes a little longer to affect there games) but none the less all thees sites and mags that keep awarding perfect scores and goty awards to a flawed game have lost all credibility in my eyes

The PS3, like the 360, has hardware inside of it that is now over 5 years old. They’re falling behind the standard that modern games demand. It’s time Sony and Microsoft got their act together and released next generation consoles.

So, about 3 months ago you released a video showing off the Skyrim UI. People complained about the lack of detail in the inventory, and other menus. Pete and Todd both assured us that the UI was “incomplete” and that more work was going to be done to it before release.

It turned out exactly the same.

You cannot abolish tables. I’m sorry, but you just can’t. Not in a game like this. You can’t substitute item sorting with a single arrow on a single item. You can’t sort some menus alphabetically, and some arbitrarily. You can’t condense all the important information about an item into a single name.

Make the UI tabulated again. How far do you need to go to try and make your game not look like an RPG? Are you at a loss for sales? Is an audience of 10 million not large enough? Can’t you just call it a day, accept that some people aren’t going to buy the game regardless of how technical the menus look and implement a UI with some degree of high level functionality. I realise this is all likely stemmed from the complaints about Oblivion’s AI. Perhaps you shouldn’t have taken the complaints at face value, because the only real problem was the list length. Apart from that, it had everything that people want and need from an UI.

I respectfully disagree. Overall I think that they have found a really sweet spot between classic RPG and the Zen simplicity that comes with console gaming.

There are a lot of difficult design decisions that went into this, no doubt. With each interface design choice, compromises have to be made. For example they went for a unsaturated, monochromatic interface so that the items and scenery really stand out. This makes for a greater immersion.

The tabulated interface is so… Microsoft Spreadsheet. It may have been a standard feature in past RPGs. Why would that make it a required feature for a modern RPG?

The main reason I’m replying to your post is that I have personally felt a great lack of immersion in the MMOs I played in the last few years. And so I found Skyrim’s spartan, humble, Zen interface to be very refreshing.

Let me explain better: every time I tried to take a screenshot in a MMO, I would use the key that toggles off the HUD displays. Everyone does that right? Because you have all this information layered over the scenery.

And almost every single time I would be like “whoah! this feels so much more like I’m actually there. I wish I could play like this!”. And so I started to realize just how damaging all these on screen displays are to the sense of immersion. I use MMOs as an example because they are the absolute worst of this.

You not only lose a sense of immersion, but you also end up just missing out on all the wonderful details that have been crafted by the artists.

It’s a great price to pay. And I’m very happy to see a game like Skyrim take on this bold approach and go for a much more immersive interface.

Now to be fair on your typical fantasy MMO, the gameplay is much different, and a lot of this on screen information is required by the gameplay that these games require.

With all that said the UI in Skyrim is far from perfect. I also had a very bad impression during the first hour or playing. I had to get used to using the WASD movement keys to control the menus.

These are the major UI problems I have in Skyrim right now:

* Mouse cursor is laggy. This means I end up using the keyboard 80% of the time.
* Yet on PC, it is not consistent. Sometimes you must use the mouse to dismiss modal dialogs (although I recently found out that one can use Y and N to answer some dialogs) (would be better to highlight one answer, and let us change the focus with left/right as done in the other menus, imho).
* Even when using he keyboard, the mouse cursor will make whatever is under it highlighted when you press the E key. It is very annoying, and if you try to move the mouse cursor away on the border of the screen, the camera moves.
* Sometimes the dialogue menus become very confusing because the mouse changes the “reference point”, so when you press up/down, you think the one aligned to the >>> arrow is the highlighted item, but it isn’t. As you try to scroll up and down through a long list of items, you find that the center is no longer in the middle but higher or lower because the mouse cursor happened to be hovering there when you opened the menu.

As I posted in a previous blog post, I think one possible fix on the PC version would be to stop the mouse from interfering at all, until you move it or actually click the mouse button. So if you use only the keyboard, it should never mess up with your highlighted options. Perhaps even hide it entirely and fade it in, when the mouse moves, which would be in line with the Zen approach of the UI.

Love the game, works perfectly on both my PC and PS3. If you can only complain about it just play MW3. Atleast you don’t have to worry about bugs there, since they made the exact same game 8 times now. New game = new problems, especially with games as big as Skyrim. But it will work out.

While all that is wonderful I just want to play the bloody game. Each post with smiley faces makes me a little bit bitter. I’ll hop on the hug train when I’ve managed to get more than a handful of quests done which seems to be sometime after January. I’d love someone to say more than “We are aware some people are having trouble with [insert a few issues”.

Something more like “Yes, we made a mistake but now we are going to do all we can to correct it.” There hasn’t seemed to be a direct confession, only more examples of grinning faces. I don’t think the people involved in the story and coding, etc, are laughing at us – they want us to enjoy the game they poured their effort into – I’m not saying that. Somebody screwed a pooch though and it would be lovely to hear from them. You’d probably leave yourself open to some angry folk trying to sue you so I guess I can kind of understand why you haven’t.

BioWare were acting pretty similar with their recent fudge up (Dragon Age 2). At least with you dudes it is simply a problem with playability (is that even a word) and not some project leader bending loyal fans over and giving them a good seeing to in the sense of the entire feel of the game.

to chime in, my biggest complaint is the journal. at first i thought i didn’t know how to select a quest to read the details of it.. then i realized there is no such thing. every quest in the game is one sentence and a quest marker on your map. (i have all quest markerd turned off in the .ini btw, i think they ruin a game). but what i really want is a way to read more in depth about a quest, for example if it was initiated a while ago and i dont remember much about it. you could just follow the quest marker and find out but thats lame. in morrowind you could look up every single conversation you had with anyone about any given subject- it really enriched the lore of the game. now its just read one sentence, follow the arrow. lame!

Daaaammnn, people in the comments here sound screwed! I feel your pain 🙁 Luckily I haven’t encountered any real bugs so far. Only thing for me is even on patch 1.3 some dragons don’t attack me but I find it rather cool, just having them stare at me, stalking me for a while is awesome. I play on pc though…

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3251
Maybe you guys can implement something similar on consoles or at least kenect, makes the game 10 times more epic when you can say all the shouts yourself. Though I suspect the 360 at least is more or less capped across the board lol.

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I cannot believe how fast you put skyrim out without fixing all of the bugs!! I pay 60$ for this brand new game and am constantly having to reset my PS3, I am very disappointed an pissed how bad you have done this game! You should soon patch this an fix the many many problems!!